Traffic Fine Payment and Road Safety

How do you pay your traffic fines swiftly and with ease?

The Arrive Alive Website has partnered with Pocit to enable drivers to pay their fines with ease and on time! Traffic fines should not be regarded merely as an inconvenience – but rather an important measure to enhance the safety of all road users. It needs to serve as a warning to respect the Rules of the Road and to be alert and safe on our roads!

Innovative South African cellphone payment solution, Pocit (www.Pocit.mobi) is proud to be associated with Arrive Alive and PayFine in finding constructive ways to help motorists fund the services that save lives and make travelling safer.

Pocit can be used on any cellphone with a colour screen on any network. Pocit can send or receive money from any bank, all the payer needs is your cellphone number. Pocit, a uniquely South African system, also does not require special SIM cards as some payment systems demand. It has the widest range of applications of any cellphone payment system in South Africa. You can pay your municipal bills by cellphone with Pocit or big retailers like Truworths or Woolworths; you can pay your Neotel account, medical bills, shop online with e-Dreams or pay for a magazine subscription like Huisgenoot.

According to the Payments Association of South Africa cellphone payments are safer than any other form of payment system. By contrast internet banking is becoming increasingly perilous, the SA Banking Risk Information Centre (Sabric) said “bank related internet-based crime is being regarded as the fastest growing form of crime globally.”

Pocit is considerably faster than internet banking and much cheaper it takes a minute to make a payment at a cost of 35c on your bank or credit card statement compared to a minimum of R3,50 for internet banking and at least R6 to draw cash from an ATM or around R10 to draw cash from a teller in a bank.

David Reynders, managing director of Pocit, which is part of Tradebridge, led the team that developed it. “Those with credit or cheque cards can use Pocit to pay anyone who has a cellphone that is GRPS enabled (has a web browser).”

Reynders forecasts that 2010 will see rapid growth in mobile payments. “South African consumers have not yet adopted cellphone payments as they eagerly as they have in Asia, where many payments are done using mobile telephony – you can buy a softdrink by pointing your cellphone at a vending machine and clicking. Or even in the United States, where Bank of America alone has more than 25m clients making payments, checking account balances and transferring money with their cellphones.

“Once you use a system as secure and as easy as Pocit, everything else seems slow and inconvenient. Mobile payments are possibly the biggest advance in money use ever.”

He also pointed out that while internet banking on computers was common for the elite, more people have cellphones and will increasingly use those for payments. The United Nations International Telecommunication Union says Africa had 65 million new mobile telephone subscribers in 2007. Cellphone penetration rose from one in 50 people in 2000 to a third of all Africans population today.

Reynders said, “Pocit is the fastest, cheapest and most secure way to pay anyone. Even if you lose your cellphone, no one cannot log in without your pin. The financial meltdown in global markets has underscored the need for change – we’re proud to be part of the solution.”